Californians

For the past month, my mail-in ballot for the upcoming primary election has been sitting on my kitchen counter collecting dust. Every day, I walk by it. I’ve even put a pen on top of it, as a reminder to fill it out, to do my civic duty. But I haven’t even been able to bring myself to pry open the seal. And I’m hardly the only one. Of California’s roughly 22 million registered voters, only about 14% had returned their ballots as of Monday. Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc., expects turnout will…

Jayne Jordan, 61, was a lifelong Californian until August, when she sold her home in Corona and moved to Azle, Texas.Jordan wanted to stay close to her daughter and grandchildren, who are planning to move from Irvine to the Lone Star State next year in order to buy a home.When she joined a Facebook group of California migrants to Texas, she found a community willing to help her choose the right moving company and weigh in on which route to take for the 1,360-mile drive.She soon found through the Facebook group that her…

The human gut is teeming with trillions of microbes, but most studies of this vast community have focused on people living in urban regions. Now, a team of researchers has sequenced gut microbiomes from Hadza people — members of a hunter-gatherer society in northern Tanzania — and compared them with those from people in Nepal and California. The study has found not only that the Hadza tend to have more gut microorganisms than people in the other groups, but that a Western lifestyle seems to diminish the diversity of gut…

Mexico City —  A current and former employee at a luxury hotel in Mexico where two Americans were found dead this week said managers of the resort ignored repeated signs of a possible gas leak and disabled carbon monoxide detectors to stop their alarms from disturbing guests.Ricardo Carbajal, a former night manager at Rancho Pescadero, a $600-a-night beachfront boutique hotel owned by Hyatt, said carbon monoxide detectors sounded frequently over a period of about three months late last year, likely because of leaks in a…

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Friday, June 2.It’s been a wild few years of weather extremes in California, where the pendulum has swung from a historic drought to one of the wettest, snowiest winters on record.So how are Californians feeling after the weather whiplash? A new poll from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times sought to understand that. “Although responses were sharply divided along political lines, they seemed to reflect a…

Hello, it’s Thursday, May 25, and here are the stories you shouldn’t miss today:TOP STORIES A majority of Californians say Feinstein is no longer fit for officeA substantial majority of Californians feel that Sen. Dianne Feinstein is no longer fit for the job due to her recent declining health, and more voters believe she should resign than support her staying in office, according to a new UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times.Feinstein, 89, returned to Washington in…

This story originally published in Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.So says Matthew Broderick in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” and he might as well be talking about California these days. As the planet continues to heat up, the state’s landscapes, watersheds and weather are shifting so fast it can be difficult to keep track. Record snowfall in the…

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Monday, April 10. When you turn on the tap, how confident are you that clean water will flow? Are you that certain about water access in five years? In 10? How about 20?Perhaps the most consequential impact of the climate crisis is how it will affect our access to reliable, clean drinking water. California has been through the wringer in the last decade with extreme heat, record drought, historic wildfires and, most recently, devastating flooding —…

It takes only the sound of raindrops hitting the roof to seize Tulare County resident Tony Ferranti with thoughts of filling sandbags, restocking supplies and keeping a close watch on area bridges.“It’s sort of a flood PTSD,” Ferranti said Sunday, as he and thousands of others prepared for the arrival of the latest in a series of major storms that have hit the Central Valley since January.The new weather system, which began moving into the region on Sunday and stretches across the lower third of the state, is forecast to…

Florida is likely to continue to draw older people and retirees, but just how much it will attract others will depend on what happens with housing prices and economic growth in both states. “What’s new is that Florida has emerged as an alternative for industries that have historically been big in California,” said Joel Kotkin, a fellow at Chapman University who has written widely on California demographic, social and economic trends. That includes tech and the commercial space industry, he said, and expansion of its…